Morphotrophic by Greg Egan.
Review on Medium. November 9th 2024.

In this book, Greg Egan is inspired by Michael Levins work
on Xenobots. Small assemblies of cells, derived from frog embryos,
that are triggered in such a way that they form structures and
perform actions that are very different from what they
normally do in the frogs (they have been taken from).

Michael Levin et al. writes in 
 "A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms":
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910837117
''we here present a method that designs completely biological machines
 from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation,
 and the best designs are then built by combining together different 
biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to 
design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside 
the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further 
broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt''.

In "The Computational Boundary of a ''Self'': 
Developmental Bioelectricity Drives 
Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition"
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688/full
Levin writes:

''How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of 
smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of 
metazoan creatures bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually 
explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the 
basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger organism''.

''I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability 
to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization and 
suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive 
capacities of highly diverse types of agents''.

''The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells 
to form electrical networks that process information 
- suggest a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps 
that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single 
cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents''.

''Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity
 suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions 
emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis
 and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective
 on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, 
testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have
 implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology, 
but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology''.

Which in itself sounds almost like science fiction.
But Egan wouldn't be Egan if it stopped here. He is not just out 
to say something about our own biology, but also tries to imagine
 how similar kinds of organizational principles  might have played 
out under different circumstances (I.e. imagining alternatives 
to our biology, also with a biological history going 
back hundreds of millions of years).

In Morphotropic it goes like this: 
''Maybe there is enough frog neurology going on to keep a frog body
alive, but the human parts still learning the ropes''.

''She would build some kind of map - representing both the 
shapes she had assumed, and the signals she had used to create them.
But she must have found enough structure in the way the two things 
were correlated to extend the map beyond her experience, and 
anticipate the results of new patterns she hadn't tried yet. Or,
like some student of ancient languages, she had mastered enough
of the rules to guess the words for ''wings'' without ever seeing it before''.

On Goodreads Reviews Kam Yung Soh writes:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210386150-morphotrophic
''Attempts to directly transfer cells from one organism to another 
usually result in rejection by the immune system. But in this story,
 groups of cell (cytes) communicate with each other and with 
other cells to determine their course of action. Given the 
right signals, the cells can decide as a group to, for example, 
leave a person for another person which provides a better environment''.

Perhaps, in the end creating ''flourishers'':
''(Starting from a) Swapper, a person who actively 
seeks out others to exchange their cytes, hoping 
to find a better combination of cytes that may eventually
 let them live as Flourishers, a group of people whose 
cytes cooperate so well that they can live for hundreds of years''.


For some it might be ''just'' an exploration of an alternative biology.
For others its probably a hint of something to come... 
Not for the squeamish though.

Still, great stuff from Egan, as usual. 

See more about Egan here:
https://x.com/gregegansf?lang=da

Sila, Nov. 9th 2024.
SimonLaub.net/Post/2025/Onwards2025/Onwards2025.html